Sonny Fulks is a graduate of Ohio State University where he pitched four varsity seasons for the Buckeyes from 1971 through 1974. He furthered his baseball experience as a minor league umpire for seven seasons, working for the Florida State League (A), the Southern League (AA), and the American Association (AAA). He has written for numerous websites, and for the past fourteen years has served as columnist and photo editor for The Gettysburg Magazine, published by the University of Nebraska Press, in Lincoln Nebraska. His interests include history, support for amateur baseball, the outdoors, and he has dual arts degrees from Ohio State University.

There’s a fundamental reason why people hate winter, summer, hot, cold…and even an official’s call. It’s called control, and it has to be ‘fair’. After 65 years I’m not so sure.

Get ready to email me, because we need some good stuff for the next ‘Reader Speaks’ page.

Because, I’m about to tell you why I’m tired of hearing people bitch about the cold, and climate change – that it’s Trump’s fault, or some Republican in West Virginia whose power company burns coal to make electricity. That we’re ruining the earth, trashing the environment. And worse, we trust someone in Congress, and the media, telling us it’s so.

Because…when was the last time you were sure ANYONE in government, or the media, was telling you the truth?

A lot of you don’t read – don’t pay attention to history…except for the parts you like. In this case, the warm and fuzzy parts. But if you did you’d realize that climate change has been around for 2,000 years. And funny that no one now goes back to the dust bowl of the 30s and blames that on carbon dioxide emissions. No one goes back to the devastating winter of 1936 and sees any correlation to what we fear and talk about today. There was severe heat in the summer, and severe cold in the winter. And you know what? There were half the people on earth back then, and no auto emissions. And still, people were hot, and people were cold!

We’re mad about this now because we’ve been conditioned by government – by the parties – that we can control what we don’t like. In the old days no one gave it a thought. You knew it was going to be cold in the winter and you took appropriate measures – shelter and something to provide heat.

Now, because it gets attention and votes, one party blames the other. Panic…crisis. The liberals blame the rich industrialists for sacrificing the environment for the sake of profit. The conservatives cite science. In fact, scientists can claim that the earth has increased in temperature by just one degree, fahrenheit, in the last one hundred years. ONE DEGREE. So if you’re standing on the corner waiting for a bus this morning, and it’s zero, or 1 above, can you honestly tell the difference?

But we want control – control of everything – because government tells we can. We can wipe suffering. We can wipe out injustice. We can eliminate hate. And there’s no reason it has to be 10 below zero, if we just went ‘green’!

But, we were told in 1992 that if we didn’t change the we’d all be dead by 2010. It didn’t happen. We were told in 1996 that if we didn’t take drastic measures the polar ice caps would all melt and drown everyone. That didn’t happen, either. So, at what point do you believe?

But still, we want control. We want the NFC Championship game to be fair. It might take fifty replays and ten hours to play it, but we want some kind of control over the outcome. We want ‘FAIR’.

We want to wipe out inequality and inconsistency with the human experience, but we also want to wipe out personal responsibility. Government can do it for us.

We want wealth for everyone, but we don’t want anyone to profit from it by creating industry and jobs. We’re convinced now that ‘trickle down’ is a hoax. But we believe in global warming?

I’m tired of hearing about it because I live in the here and now. We all do. It’s always been cold, and I’m burning red oak (a renewable resource) in my stove this week because I planned for it.

Life’s never been fair, and I’m convinced it never will be. We believe the network news, and I’m pretty sure that some of us always will.

But take my word, not theirs. Regardless of who runs in 2020…a hundred years from now it’s going to be 10 below in January. And someone will be there to tell you why.